Soul

Encyclopedia of Science and Religion
COPYRIGHT 2003 The Gale Group Inc.

Soul

In English, the term soul can refer to a metaphysical entity or to the state of one's character. A philosopher may disdain the first and applaud the second. This entry focuses on the soul as an entity but concludes with noting why work on the soul is often centered on values.

Evolution of the idea

In ancient Greek philosophy the soul was thought of as a principle of life; the soul is what gives a person life as a human being. For Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) the soul (Greek, psyche ) was identified as the form of the body. Aristotle delimited a host of different kinds of souls befitting nonhuman animal and plant life. In plants, for example, the soul was thought to be comprised of the plant's nutritive and reproductive powers. The human soul shares many of the powers of other living things but has distinctive intellectual powers as well. Aristotle's teacher, Plato (428–348 b.c.e.) thought of the human soul as an immaterial concrete subject capable of preexisting the body and living on after the body's destruction. In the important work De Anima (On the soul), Aristotle hints at an incorporeal, immaterial aspect to the human soul, but falls short of Plato's more enthusiastic delineation of the soul as independent of the body.

The medieval period favored Plato over Aristotle on the soul, until the Italian philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) appropriated and rethought Aristotle's philosophy of nature in a Christian context. While Aquinas more firmly identified the embodiment of the soul in concrete, material terms, he retained belief in an individual's afterlife and did not embrace a thorough materialism.

The early modern era was profoundly ambivalent about the soul. Modern science was deeply suspicious of Aristotle, and the success of mechanical explanations of the material world were not especially hospitable to the soul and its principles of life. The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) demarcated the mind as distinct from the body, but increasingly a form of materialism or naturalism gained ground. Unease about the soul as a distinguishable entity was also fueled by some theologians during the Reformation. Some reformers did not believe the Hebrew Bible welcomed Platonism. In the creation story God makes human beings out of the dust of the ground, into which God breathes the breath of life (Gen. 2:7).

Challenges

The wholesale identification of the soul and the body met with obstacles, however. From the vantage point of modern science, matter (and eventually matter and energy) is not intentional; fundamental physical causal processes do not involve beliefs and desires. If complete and adequate explanations of the cosmos do not involve beliefs and desires, how is one to account for, let alone describe, everyday human activities? Very basic reasoning (1 + 1 = 2 ) seems to be based on beliefs and reasons (because I grasp 1 + 1, and I grasp that 2 is 1 + 1, I see that the mathematical relationship is necessary). Mechanistic science seems to write off such psychological accounts of our reasoning. This causes an especially difficult challenge with a mechanistic philosophy, for such a philosophy is customarily introduced as a theory that ought to be accepted based on some plausible beliefs about the evidence. But if the theory is correct, then beliefs play no essential role in explaining states of the world. In other words, mechanical, reductive materialism faces the danger of undermining the common sense understanding of humans as rational agents.

Materialists have developed different replies. The most dramatic, as represented by contemporary cognitive scientists and philosophers Stephen Stich, Paul Churchland, and Patricia Churchland, has been to deny that there are any such things as beliefs and desires. Other materialists have denied that psychological explanations are truly explanations in the same category as a scientific explanations. Some consider these two options desperate, for the first risks self-refutation (Stich believes that there are no beliefs) or refutation from common sense, while the second recommends a radical dualism more severe than Descartes's. The alternative, deemed by many to be more promising, is to develop some kind of nonreductive materialism, a theory that recognizes the beliefs, desires, and other powers that used to be associated with the soul, and yet views these beliefs as either identical to, constituted by, or emergent upon physical processes. As of the early 2000s, there is no universally accepted version of nonreductive materialism. Perhaps largely because of this lack of consensus on a problem-free form of materialism, there are some prominent philosophers who defend a form of dualism in which the soul is a distinctive, nonphysical entity.

Arguments over the metaphysics of the soul and arguments over values are closely related. If the whole scope of powers associated with the soul (beliefs, desires) does not exist or has no role to play in a mature explanation of the cosmos, then the values that appear to permeate and define human lives seem to be in jeopardy. It was his perception of this plight that led Stich to revise his radical skepticism about beliefs and desires. The moral implications of eliminating beliefs also led Paul Churchland to try to secure morality within his reductive science; he took on this project under a book title that explicitly refers to the soul: The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (1995).

Some contemporary theologians are highly motivated to see the soul in material terms. Your soul is your material body, functioning physically, psychologically, and spiritually. A dualist view of the soul is sometimes described as more Platonic than Christian. The effort to see human embodiment in integrated terms is easily appreciated, but it is difficult to avoid the dualist implications of the Bible and Christian tradition. If the soul can survive the death of the body (perhaps to be reembodied at the Resurrection), then it appears that the soul and body are not identical.

As in the Christian tradition, Jewish and Islamic philosophers have shifted between material accounts of the soul in the spirit of Aristotlean and Platonic mind-body dualism. Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions that allow for reincarnation (a rebirth of the soul in distinct material embodiments) explicitly teach or implicitly assume a distinction between body and soul.

While Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have traditionally seen the soul as a substantive individual, enduring over time, Hindu and Buddhist literature have cast the individuality of the soul in more conditional terms. In Advaita Hinduism, different human souls are identical with the singular Divine Being. In the Buddhist tradition, the soul is a composite of perception, intelligence, form, feeling, and volition.

Popular culture in North America since the mid-1980s has seen a great revival of talk about the soul. Popularized forms of Renaissance Platonism have become fashionable. There is also some effort by philosophers to rekindle language about the soul in which having a soul is understood to involve depth of character or a meaningful presence or availability. People may be said to have a soul when they have deep convictions and integrity. The result is that there is more than one way to lose one's soul, either through a radical form of materialism, or through ethical failure, or a break down of integrity, or the refusal to lead an examined life.

soul

soul In the Hebrew scriptures, the human being is a single and undivided entity: the soul and body are not clearly distinguished from one another. Thus any discussion of life after death points to the resurrection of the body rather than the immortality of the soul (Isaiah 26: 19 and Daniel 12: 2). Jewish and Old Testament scholars have debated whether the authors of the Hebrew scriptures ever thought of the body and soul as distinct entities; certainly, later Jewish writers have interpreted passages such as Ecclesiastes 12: 7 — ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it’ — to mean that at the death of the body the soul returns to reside with God forever.

The Greek, especially the Platonic, tradition saw the soul and body as utterly distinct and separate entities. For the Platonists, the soul is the human being; the intellect is eternal, and pre-exists and survives the body. In this earthly life, the soul makes use of the body and its instincts which, while not seen as evil, must be kept under control. While Aristotle modified this Platonic teaching, the Neoplatonist, Plotinus, developed it such that his biographer, Porphyry, recorded that Plotinus would tell no one his birth date, as the day of his soul's entry into his body was cause for mourning, not celebration.

This Greek tradition affected Judaism. The Greek-speaking community in Alexandria, of whom the foremost member was the philosopher Philo, began to understand the body and soul as completely distinct from one another, and Philo taught the immortality of the soul. The distinction between body and soul exists everywhere in the Rabbinical/Talmudic literature, and medieval Jewish thinkers understood the body and soul as being in struggle, and therefore promoted a denial of bodily pleasures; Maimonides saw the building up of the body as occurring at the expense of the destruction of the soul. The Kabbalists believed that the soul was a divine entity which had to descend into the body.

The Christian tradition took on both the Hebrew and Greek traditions in its thinking about the soul. The Incarnation — the Word made flesh — emphasized the Hebrew notion of the unity of body and soul: Jesus was born of a woman, and thus God took human form, with a body and soul. However, in the Hellenistic world in which much of Christianity spread, Platonic notions of the soul as temporarily imprisoned in the body took hold, so that Origen, for example, believed that humans were originally created as intellects without a body, and taught that the pre-existing soul entered the body after it had fallen into sin, and was bound to the body as a punishment. However, he also taught that the soul uses the body for healing and restoration: the body itself is not evil, but rather our misuse of free will is the root of our evil (Origen's teaching on the soul was condemned, after his death, at the fifth ecumenical council in Constantinople, in 553). By contrast, Clement, another Platonist, did not understand the soul as pre-existing and saw the body in a more positive way, as the ‘soul's consort and ally’.

Ideas about the soul were linked to notions of resurrection of the body, and from the third century to the late Middle Ages many theologians emphasized the full and literal resurrection of the body after death. Tertullian, for example, following a stoic metaphysics, not only believed that resurrection meant the full reassemblage of the body but also that all reality is corporeal, and therefore even the soul is composed of fine material particles. Irenaeus held a similar view. However, such ideas gradually declined, and by the later Middle Ages Aquinas' view that the soul is an individual spiritual substance was becoming predominant (though it did not go unchallenged) and eventually received wide acceptance amongst many branches of Christianity. For Aquinas, influenced by Aristotle, body and soul together form the human unity, though the soul can be separated from the fleshly body, as happens at death, and continue to exist. It is believed, in this scholastic tradition, that each soul is made by God individually for each human body (Creationism, as opposed to Traducianism, a belief in which the soul is the product of the generative, material power of human beings, a view that was to be held by many Lutherans and Calvinists).

In some other religious systems and philosophies, body and soul are not as sharply opposed as they often have been in Christianity. In Taoism, the religious philosophy developed in China, the soul is essential to the body's wholeness and healing. Central to Taoism is a system of meditation and prayer in which the soul relates to the inner body and the external world. The ‘shen’, meaning soul or spirit, resides in the heart. When ch'i (mind energy), shen (soul), and ching (intuition and physical powers) are in harmony, the body is healthy, works in concert with nature and the person lives a long time. However, a person dies when the ch'i and ching are exhausted and at that point the soul leaves the body. In Zoroastrianism, the world's oldest prophetic religion, which originated in Iran, body and soul are seen as distinct from each other, but not necessarily opposed in a dualistic manner; indeed, bodily sickness is said to indicate the soul's sickness, while bodily health, fertility, and maturity indicate spiritual health. The body is to be treated with respect and is seen as a part of the human being's ultimate nature, not a means to an incorporeal nature.

Soul

Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology
COPYRIGHT 2001 The Gale Group Inc.

Soul

The term soul is used in two senses—it indicates the ego and the spirit-body. In ancient writings, an individual was described as a triune being: body, soul, and spirit. According to this concept, the soul is just as much an envelope, animated by the spirit, as the physical body is an envelope for the soul. At death the soul withdraws and continues to function in the spiritual world. Astral body and soul are almost equivalent terms.

Some occult and Eastern teachings, however, speak of five bodies of differing degrees of refinement that will be cast away in time just as the physical body is left behind.

In his book Man and the Universe (1908), Sir Oliver Lodge defined the soul and ego as,

" … that controlling and guiding principle which is responsible for our personal expression and for the construction of the body, under the restrictions of physical condition and ancestry. In its higher development it includes also feeling and intelligence and will, and is the storehouse of mental experience. The body is its instrument or organ, enabling it to receive and convey physical impressions, and to effect and be effected by matter and energy."

Because such concepts as "soul" and "spirit" (as its animating essence) are not available for scientific scrutiny like the body or the world of matter generally, many scientists have either denied their existence as real entities or as a reality not subject to scientific scrutiny, although retaining as useful the concept of consciousness, with which the ego is associated.

Spiritualists claim that there is evidence for survival of consciousness after death, and that there is sufficient individuality in the surviving consciousness to justify the use of the term soul. A good deal of psychical research tends to confirm this position, without necessarily accepting the religious implications of such survival.

Christianity has generally taught the resurrection of the body, although, in light of Paul's mention of a spiritual resurrection body, there has been some disagreement on the exact nature of that revived body. The doctrine of the soul has always vied for attention with the Greek notion of the immortality of the soul.

In Eastern religious philosophy, there are clear distinctions between the gross ego of name and form (with individual experience) and the subtle ego that is claimed as a universal substratum of all individual souls. The gross ego, by reason of its limitations of experience and consciousness, is tied to the world of matter, which is transient. This ego is an obstruction to fuller awareness of reality and must be transcended by selfless service and refinement of consciousness. In this process, the individual soul loses its attachment to the transient desires and fears of material life and is eventually subsumed in a divine consciousness. In this progress, the world of matter becomes like an illusion that ceases to have validity when divine reality supervenes. As long as an attachment to the world of matter and sense experience remains, the soul must go through a process of reincarnation.

The concept of the soul remains unverifiable by experimental method that is based on the limitations of material existence itself. But it is a useful concept insofar as it relates to individual subjective experience, which is often more relevant to ethical goals than laboratory experiments.

For many individuals, the conviction that there is a soul that is independent of (although shaped by) the physical body occurs as they experience out-of-the-body travel or astral projection. Such an experience is an overwhelming one to most who have it and has become a profound religious experience to many individuals.

soul

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

soul, the vital, immaterial, life principle, generally conceived as existing within humans and sometimes within all living things, inanimate objects, and the universe as a whole. Religion and philosophy have long been concerned with the nature of the soul in their attempts to understand existence and the meaning of life.

Differing Views of the Soul

In more primitive religions (forms of animism and spiritism), the soul is often conceived as controlling both motor and mental processes; death, the cessation of these processes, is thus viewed as caused by the departure of the soul. Pantheism denies the individuation of human souls, and materialism declares the soul nonexistent. One of the widespread concepts in religion is that of immortality, which almost always postulates the existence of a soul that lives apart from the body after death.

In early Hebrew thought, soul connoted the life principle, but in later times the concept of a soul independent of the body arose. The soul of the righteous was seen as achieving immortality, rejoining the resurrected body at the end of days. Similarly, in Islam, a person's soul is, according to the Qur'an, the original spirit that God breathed into Adam. Its seat is the heart and it is endowed with two basic impulses—good and evil. After death the souls of the pious stay near Allah and will be reunited with their risen bodies on the Day of Judgment.

In Eastern religions, which do not stress individual salvation, the emphasis is placed on transcendent principles embodied in a multiplicity of gods (see world soul). The Hindu and Buddhist doctrines of reincarnation do not posit the existence of an individual soul, but rather stress the closeness of the human person, in successive transformations, to an overriding principle of virtue, piety, and peace.

No distinction between the rational soul (i.e., the soul of a person in scholastic Christianity) and others is made in many systems; such a distinction is quite impossible in most forms of reincarnation and of transmigration of souls. The soul of humanity when such is conceived as existing is called the world soul, or anima mundi. For many Western philosophers the term soul is synonymous with mind (e.g., René Descartes). Others, although asserting its undefinability, have seen it as a useful element in a system of ethics (e.g., Immanuel Kant). This undefinability has led yet others to reject the idea of a soul and to postulate ethical systems based upon a different conception of human nature (e.g., William James).

The Soul in Christianity

In Christianity the soul is all important. However, because the Bible does not give a formal definition of the concept, Christian interpretations vary greatly. Under the influence of the Neoplatonists, the soul often came to be set over against the body in a dualistic concept that posited a God-given soul distinct from an inferior, earth-bound body. Scholasticism (specifically that of St. Thomas Aquinas) studied the soul in great elaboration, and the scholastic definition of the soul as
"substantial form of the body"
obviates many philosophical difficulties. The nature of humanity is involved in the whole consideration of the soul; hence the term
"rational soul"
for the distinctive soul of humans. The soul of beasts is called the
"animal soul"
and that of plants the
"vegetative soul."
The scholastics considered the rational soul alone as immortal and capable of union with God.

The origin of the soul has been a controversial question in Christian history. Two points of view may be distinguished: creationism, which posits that God creates each individual soul in a special act of creation (at the time of conception according to some or that of birth according to others), and traducianism, which suggests that the parents in begetting the child beget the soul too. The creationist principle has been generally held sway in Christianity.

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Soul

In the Hebrew scriptures, the soul and the body are not sharply distinguished. The words ruʾaḥ (‘breath’, ‘wind’), nefesh (that which locates the animate as opposed to the dead—as e.g. ‘the waters have come up to my nefesh’, i.e. neck), and neshāmah (‘vitality’) have no independent, ontological status: they refer to that which gives life and which, if it is absent, leads to death. The rabbis of the Talmudic period recognized some separation. The soul was understood as the guest of the body during the body's earthly life (Lev.R. 34. 3). Jewish philosophers, such as Philo, Saʿadiah Gaon, and Solomon ibn Gabirol, were influenced by Platonism in their teachings on the immortality of the soul, while the kabbalists taught that the soul was a divine entity that evolved downwards to enter the body. It has its origins in the divine emanation and its ultimate goal is its return to the world of sefirot.

The New Testament writers inherited the biblical terminology (though in Greek), together with the undecided contest about the basic human composition and about whether any part of it might continue after death. Roughly, nephesh became psyche and ruaḥ became pneuma; but both these were transformed by the resurrection of Jesus and by the experience of the Holy Spirit in the early Church. Thus early Christianity came to believe that the psyche must be surrendered to God with complete commitment and trust, even to the extent of, so to speak, losing it (Matthew 6. 25, 16. 25; Mark 8. 35; Luke 9. 24; John 12. 25) and thus securing it. The soul was then associated with a belief that there will be an embodied resurrection. In the Hellenistic world, an application of the dualism of Plato nevertheless seemed spiritually attractive, since the sense of a soul imprisoned in a body (sōma sēma, ‘the body a tomb’) led to a heroic spirituality in which ascetic efforts might be made to ensure the soul's escape and safety.

soul

soul
/ sōl/
•
n.
1.
the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal. ∎
a person's moral or emotional nature or sense of identity:
in the depths of her soul, she knew he would betray her. ∎
the essence of something:
integrity is the soul of intellectual life. ∎
emotional or intellectual energy or intensity, esp. as revealed in a work of art or an artistic performance:
their interpretation lacked soul.2.
a person regarded as the embodiment of a specified quality:
he was the soul of discretion. ∎
an individual person:
I'll never tell a soul. ∎
a person regarded with affection or pity:
she's a nice old soul.3.
African-American culture or ethnic pride. ∎
short for soul music.
PHRASES:bare one's soulsee bare.the life and soul of the partysee life.lost soul
a soul that is damned.
∎ chiefly humorous
a person who seems unable to cope with everyday life.
sell one's soul
(to the devil) see sell.upon my soul dated
an exclamation of surprise.DERIVATIVES:souled adj. [in comb.]
she was a great-souled character.ORIGIN:Old Englishsāwol, sāw(e)l, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch ziel and German Seele.

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soul

soul the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal. The word is recorded from Old English (in form sāwol, sāw(e)l), and is of Germanic origin.

The Souls were a late 19th-century aristocratic circle with predominantly cultural and intellectual interests; the name was said to have been given by Lord Charles Beresford in 1888. Members of the group included Curzon, Arthur Balfour, and Margot Tennant (later Margot Asquith).soul music a kind of music incorporating elements of rhythm and blues and gospel music, popularized by American blacks. Characterized by an emphasis on vocals and an impassioned improvisatory delivery, it is associated with performers such as Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Otis Redding.

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soul

soul Non-material or non-tangible part of a person that is the central location of his/her personality, intellect, emotions and will; the human spirit. Most religions teach that the soul lives on after the death of the body.

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